Games that simply inspire to create more: Re-Mission-2

In  other posts I have referred to use of games for education, and there are many signs that it is a path worth developing further. The Google Hangout that we had on July 1 gave a range of further inputs and ideas from the network on what games inspire. There is a small team of people who has joined a Transmissible Workspace to further work on such ideas and we welcome enthusiastic partners who are interested to help us further develop.

One of the inspiring examples that we can find in Serious Games in Health Care Settings is Re-Mission and Re-Mission-2 from Hope Labs. The game was originally developed as an intervention game in a controlled trial to assess impact on the therapy adherence of adolescents and young adults to chemotherapy and to a regimen of antibiotic prophylaxis. Adherence to the treatment regimen was greater in the intervention group that had been assigned to play the game. Self-efficacy and knowledge also increased in the intervention group compared with the control group.

I can imagine that games such as the set developed by Hope Labs will give the players perhaps a ‘visual and tactile awareness’ of what the therapy should achieve within their bodies. The game may illustrate the effect of stopping a successful assault too soon, will allow a small group of ‘enemies’ to re-group and further grow to a larger army-unit. Raising awareness of the practical objective of the therapy, the importance of adhering strictly to the schedule will strengthen self efficacy.

This may certainly apply to public health issues as well, and that is exactly where we want to explore the topic further.

Ideas? Welcome ! Register to this site and share your comments below !

 

Literature:

1. Pamela M. Kato, Steve W. Cole, Andrew S. Bradlyn and Brad H. Pollock. Video Game Improves Behavioral Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults With Cancer: A Randomized Trial. Pediatrics 2008;122;e305

What games make you keep playing?

The Google Hangout of July 1st also allowed the audience to share their experience with games. We asked them “What game did you enjoy recently? And please explain (if possible) why it was enjoyable”.

Among the answers, many games with fantasy elements occurred, either as card- or board games (Magic the Gathering) or online emersive role playing (World of Warcraft).

It is not easy to explain why we like certain games, yet the majority in the audience seems to do so. Games should not be too complicated to start, according to some answers we got. Either rules should be simple, or the game should be designed such, that you gradually learn the more complex rules by playing and discovering. Some players allow games to get progressively complicated, as long as the game rewards are fun and ‘the brain is exercised’.

Cranium is a party game that comes recommended for trainers; it asks players to perform and communicate ideas in different ways. It is also quite easy to set up, and rules are simple. What I liked when reading up about this game, is the story that the designer quit his job at Microsoft after getting the idea for Cranium and dedicated his full time after that to develop and market the game (1). Sometimes we need to follow our heart.

The perspective came up that it is enjoyable to watch children play and  develop strategies. So it is not only fund to play games yourself, it is also attractive to watch others play. Recently I have discovered the world of YouTube Game Videos. These are not games in themselves, yet videos of people playing games (either online or board games). For hours these channels go on and some are immensely popular (2).

Anna wrote something very interesting in the survey, about the game that their group developed in 1999 in Czech Republic: “GAME against AIDS”. This is an interactive preventive project for schoolchildren related to the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and prevention of STI, HIV/AIDS. The project was based on experience of a German project called “Mitmach-Parcours zu AIDS, Liebe and Sexualität”, developed by the BZgA in Köln, Germany. The concept is interaction between children with moderators / peer educators standing around five ‘stations’ called:

• Ways of HIV transmission
• Love, sexuality and protection against HIV infection
• Prevention of Unwanted Pregnancies, STI and HIV
• Body Game
• Life with HIV

The main focus is to generate an ‘easy conversation’ where serious discussion is mixed with fun and humour (3). The game is still circulating in different versions in the Czech Republic.

What’s next?

In other posts I have referred to use of games for education, and there are many signs that it is a path worth developing further. So far, this is a development activity for Transmissible, with no practical products to offer. There is a small team of people helping me and we welcome enthusiastic partners who are interested to help us further develop.

 

 

Keep sharing your views

Below this post you are welcome to keep sharing your thoughts about serious games, education and public health. Registered users can comment. And registration to this site is free 🙂

References:

1. Cranium (Board Game), from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
2. This guy this-guy-makes-millions-playing-video-games-on-youtube, from The Atlantic (2014).
3. Abstract book, 4th European Conference on the Methods and Results of Social and Behavioral Research on AIDS “European Approach Towards AIDS: Research Policy, Prevention and Care”, September 2002, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Documentaries that matter

On Friday July 1 a short Transmissible Kick-Off event was held online, using Google Hangouts. In the Hangout, I presented briefly in which direction my new plans are taking me, gave an overview of the website and introduced Socrative as a teaching tool.

Those who were able to join this live event, used an online classroom to take a quiz of 3 questions. Each of the questions aimed to gather some thoughts and advice from the participants on the products that Transmissible provides. The first question was ‘What was the most impressive documentary that you remember?’. The answers help me to understand what people consider good audiovisual story-telling.

Themes observed

One theme that I observed among the answers was on stories about personal struggles to overcome adversity. Such as an individual fight against the power of a large pharmaceutical company, or the challenges that Francis Ford Coppola faced while shooting Apocalypse now, or the biographic film on Temple Grandin the autistic professor of animal behavior, or the documentary about a patient who learns at young age that she will become deaf and blind, just to mention a few examples among the answers.

What these topics have in common, in my view, is that they engage the viewer in taking the perspective of a single person facing certain challenging adversity, and then bring some inspiration through showing how people can deal with huge problems. In fact, it is singing about everyday heroes.

The other theme that I believe to see is on awareness raising about public health problems that ask either for people to change risk-behavior or that need more attention from policy makers. Examples included the documentary by Al Gore on Climate change, a documentary about rat lungworm disease and actually several titles of the previous group would also fit in this one.

Documentaries mentioned

Some examples that come from the survey:

[youtube id=”ixgd38EZIR0″ align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”OawzRyDJhTw” align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”cpkN0JdXRpM” align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”PirH8PADDgQ” align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”__cybPTbX-4″ align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”Sg3_NIUv7Z0″ align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”] [youtube id=”mOrHnctozrY” align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”]

 

What’s next?

The answers shared by the participants are very helpful. It strengthens my view that public health relevant messages deserve more formats than the mainly scientific ones. Audio-visual story telling using video productions is a great tool for awareness raising, supporting public health action. In addition, it seems to me a powerful instrument to give credit to people or groups who deserve to be known. With Transmissible I want to collaborate with video and documentary producers to deliver relevant public health storytelling.

In the next post I will write more about the answers people gave about playing games. Thanks again for all inspiration!

Continue sharing

Please keep sharing your ideas about what makes a great documentary; below this post is enough space for all your comments. Just register (widget to the right) and comment 🙂

Bringing serious games to public health

Continued education

Life long learning has become a necessity for every specialist. Continuous professional development is offered in much higher volumes than ever before, driven by stricter criteria for renewed licensing. Employees are often expected to engage in continuous development in their own time.

In addition, professional practice has become much more demanding; high work loads and especially continuous (24/7) reminders for professional tasks, via online devices. “Free time” and “working time” are becoming more entwined.
E-learning has also grown enormously this provides employees more influence on the timing of their educational activities. Sadly, many E-learning courses remain stuck at the level of ‘talking slideshows’. Loss of motivation is one of the big E-learning problems. A large proportion of the participants that start E-learning, quits and does not finish.

 

Serious Games can play a role to increase intrinsic motivation of participants and to maintain this motivation until the goal has been reached. Serious Games can support educational goals, from awareness raising and transferring new knowledge to training of new complex skills and the shaping of attitudes and judgement.  Serious games use an approach that can educate and train while entertaining users and there are several studies that demonstrate that users who practiced a serious game training have better results than users experiencing traditional learning processes (1).

 

Several games of crisis were developed by universities in which contamination is a key theme. “Hazmat: Hotzone,” (from Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with the New York Fire Department), is a multiplayer networked simulation for modeling hazardous materials emergencies. In “Hotzone,” the crises that emerge in game play can be tweaked by the interventions of an instructor using a “Wizard of Oz” interface to insert secondary events and unexpected actions in the main story about hazardous materials in a public place, such as a subway station. “Hazmat: Hotzone” allows instructors to evaluate team interactions.
Similarly, Public Health Games at the Center for the Advancement of Distance Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago has developed a multi-user anthrax outbreak simulation, “Zero Hour,” which can be run in the field on laptops or cellular telephones. (2)

 

These are few examples of serious games applied to specific public health educational objectives. Yet compared to other areas of training (defense, health care, toxicology, fire fighting), public health is still an area to be discovered by serious game developers….

 

References:

1. Francesco Ricciardi and Lucio Tommaso De Paolis. “A Comprehensive Review of Serious Games in Health Professions.” International Journal of Computer Games Technology. Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 787968
2. Losh, E. “Walls, Doors, Condoms, and Duct Tape: Serious Games about National Security and Public Health.” Discourse 29.1 (2007): 101-119. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Jun. 2016.

Zikavirus timeline by WHO

Like probably many other public health professionals, I heard about Zikavirus for the first time in October 2015 when Brazil reported an unusual number of cases of microcephaly among newborns. This report triggered a train of public health investigations. On February 1, 2016 the World Health Organisation (WHO) declares that the recent association of Zika infection with clusters of microcephaly and other neurological disorders constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

I remember many questions still being unanswered after the report from Brazil, in particular about the causality in the association between Zikavirus infection and microcephaly. The questions are representative of the type of uncertainty that surrounds a newly emerged public health threat. Some of them are part of the obligatory questions in any outbreak investigation (is this an outbreak? what exactly is the case definition? is the diagnosis confirmed? what is the validity of the diagnostic test? who is at risk? what are the main transmission routes? etc, etc). In addition to outbreak investigations other population based research projects are needed. Such as establishing seroprevalence, vector distribution, behavioral studies, forensic pathology etc. The questions about causality are much harder to answer than establishing associations.

The WHO posted a very interesting Zikavirus Timeline. Worth your time if you want to remind yourself of the key issues around this topic.

69th World Health Assembly

On Monday 23 May 2016 the Sixty-ninth session of the World Health Assembly (WHA) starts in Geneva, Switzerland. The Health Assembly is the supreme decision-making body of World Health Organisation (WHO), attended by delegations from all WHO Member States. The agenda usually addresses the policies of the Organization, financial policies, and to review and approve the proposed programme budget.

This year the following topics are on the agenda:

• Responding to health emergencies
• Violence
• Women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health
• Ageing and health
• Maternal, infant and young child nutrition
• Childhood obesity
• Noncommunicable diseases
• 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
• Health effects of air pollution
• Antimicrobial resistance
• Poliomyelitis
• Health of migrants
• Global shortage of medicines
• Safety and accessibility of children’s medication
• Communicable diseases

One quarter of the topics on this agenda relate to communicable diseases, of which antimicrobial resistance and poliomyelitis require specific focus. The former is among the largest health threats that our society faces in the next generation, the latter because of the final stages of the Polio eradication efforts currently ongoing. Yet also on ‘other communicable diseases’ a lot has been done in collaboration with the WHO.

Transmissible offers training materials, training courses and teachers for disease prevention and control, with content that is always up to date with recent developments as in the above links.

 

European Immunisation Week

European Immunisation Week (EIW) takes place from 24 – 30 April 2016. The European Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (ECDC) is putting the spotlight on its resources in support of measles and rubella elimination. These range from disease surveillance and epidemic intelligence to communication tools and guides on awareness raising about the importance of vaccination, as well as the vaccination scheduler tool.

At the ECDC Website, you will find information and tools for monitoring / surveillance of vaccine preventable diseases, communication tools and guides, a vaccine scheduler and many other resources. Should you be interested in support with projects or training related to vaccine preventable diseases then take a look at the Transmissible Services.

 

 

Zika Virus

At this stage there seems to be sufficient agreement among the public health professionals that there is an association between Zika-virus infection during pregancy.on the one hand and ‘microcephaly’ of the newborn on the other hand. This association is strong, however it does not yet constitiute proof that Zika-virus infection during pregancy causes the microcephaly of the newborn. There may still be other factors that could cause microcephaly that are also linked to the Zika-virus infection (such as potentially the chemicals and toxins that are used to control mosquito populations: in areas of Zika-virus these are used in communities where we observe microcephaly cases).

The association is strong enough to initiate public health actions, one them which will be scientific studies to identify the causal relationship between Zika-virus and microcephaly.

Currently a critical appraisal of the epidemiology of microcephaly (the outcome) in Latin America is missing. In order to have sufficient confidence (more than 95%, for example) about the causal relation between Zikavirus infection during pregnancy (as an exposure) and microcephaly of the newborn (as an outcome), then classic epidemiological studies will be required: studying all determinants of the relationship between exposure and outcome. The determinants may be causal determinants (be it necessary causes or sufficient causes), co-factors or confounders. Such studies will require a close cooperation between Epidemiology (study design and epidemiological analysis) and Microbiology (case definitions, diagnostics, identifying susceptibility).

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, has produced a rapid risk assessment on the potential association between Zikavirus and microcephaly.

This situation underlines the importance fast and adequate scientific studies ‘in the field’ to assess health risks. Understanding determinants of disease is needed to effectively target the disease through prevention and control measures. This requires a continuous evaluation of scientific evidence of causality.

In ECDC’s Rapid Risk Assessment we can recognise the importance public health functions of ‘event detection’ (surveillance and epidemic intelligence functions present to detect cases), ‘treat assessment’ (the ability to provide risk assessments, perform outbreak investigations and population based studies) in order to inform those who need to decide on ‘threat management’. The availability of competent professional staff in the public health workforce, able to perform these functions is critical for the successful operation of those functions. The key for newly discovered health threats is similar to previously known threats: early detection, early response.